LUGUFU, Tanzania (UNHCR) - Just 16 years old, Francine Afsa has lived more
than a quarter of her life in this refugee camp in western Tanzania. She
has been here with her parents, nine brothers and two sisters since 1999,
having already spent a short time in Tanzania as a refugee in 1996 when a
Tutsi-led rebellion broke out in her homeland, the Democratic Republic of
the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire).

She regards her future in the camp bleakly: "It will get worse and worse.
There is no hope for my life. I'm like someone who's in jail."

"I would love to go back to Congo once peace is restored," says this
articulate, forthright teenager. "But for the moment peace is only a dream
because there is no solution for the DRC. I am losing hope of going home."

Francine speaks for many of the nearly 87,000 Congolese refugees living in
the two sprawling camps of the Lugufu complex, who see little prospect of
going back to their homeland any time soon. With Congolese refugees still
arriving from fighting in eastern DRC, Tanzanian authorities have recently
given the UN refugee agency permission to receive an additional 4,000
refugees in Lugufu II.

Medar Mwanuke, a 53-year-old pastor, just arrived with his wife and two
small children two weeks ago. He had been a refugee between 1965 and 1968
and says, "I never thought I would be a refugee again."

He says his family decided to flee rebels of the Congolese Rally for
Democracy (RCD-Goma) faction who were looting and burning houses in the
Kalimi region of eastern DRC. "The situation in eastern Congo will not
change very soon because the government in Kinshasa and the warring
factions do not have a concrete agreement," says the pastor. "They are
still pulling strings."

When Lugufu was first opened in 1996, the shelters were makeshift, but
after full-scale war erupted in 1998 - involving troops from neighbouring
countries - refugees began building more solid houses from mud bricks.
Today, having resigned themselves to what could be a long stay as refugees,
many are growing their own crops on their assigned plots of land, giving a
lush green look to the camp.

A tailor who came to the camp in 1997 now says with a sigh, "I thought I
would be able to go home the same week. I am very sad" to be here so long.

Kennedy H. is a more recent arrival. The 26-year-old son of a Tutsi mother
and a father from the Mufuliru ethnic group, he says his family was
persecuted in eastern DRC because of the mixed marriage. Three years ago,
he says, local militias came to his home and told the family, "You are
Tutsis, you should not stay here." He says they killed his older sister on
the spot, and detained his mother for a while.

He was away from the house at the time, and when he got word of what had
happened, he fled immediately, with only the clothes on his back, the
equivalent of $20 in his pocket and his national ID card.

"Since that time I have not heard any message from them," says Kennedy,
whose uncle named him after his political hero, the late American president
John F. Kennedy. "But a few days ago, [newly-arrived refugees] told me
'your parents were killed'.

"When somebody's your neighbour and he comes and tells you your parents are
dead, you believe him." He feels the message was also a covert threat and
says he feels unsafe as a child of a Tutsi in a camp where nearly all the
refugees are from the Bemba ethnic group.

The news of his parents' death - and the fact that his three brothers and
four remaining sisters are now dispersed and on their own - haunts him. "I
can't eat any more; I lost four kilos in a few days. Before, when I got
some message from home, it couldn't touch me. But when I got the message
that my parents are dead and my little brothers are scattered, it hit me
very hard. As the oldest boy and because of my standard of education, I am
the one who should have taken care of them. Maybe I should have stayed with
them."

Fluent in English and French, as well as a number of African languages,
Kennedy also compiles a camp newspaper in Swahili, and takes his mind off
his worries by writing poetry in English. "Peace, peace, you're simple to
pronounce, but not easy to get once you're lost," run the lines of one poem.

He too has few hopes that peace will come to his homeland soon. "The
situation in the Congo is getting worse and worse because there are still
new arrivals in the camps," says Kennedy. "There are still ethnic clashes,
and no peace deal lasts more than three months. It doesn't make me very
hopeful."

For therapy, he pours out his feelings in his poetry, as he concludes in
one poem, "Remember, God will not create another world for us, so let's
find a solution."

By Kitty McKinsey
UNHCR Regional Office in Nairobi
Story date: 12 Mar 2003
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